Art That Moves: Take a Deep Breath / Jane Franklin Dance

By Helen Gineris

“It was never about the classes for me, it was always about the choreography. Much more than working on precise technical detail, it’s that whole process of making something that’s appealing to me,” says Jane Franklin, Artistic Director of Jane Franklin Dance, a company well-known for performing in non-traditional spaces including galleries and the outdoors.

Franklin welcomes Dance Is The Answer participants to experience part of that creative process even before venturing out to the Torpedo Factory Art Center for tonight's free 7 pm performance of Take a Deep Breath.

The company's latest cross-disciplinary choreographic adventure is a “dance event” consisting of two works, A Vivid Sense of Place and Double Take, which address our connection to place using the built-in space, video projection, music, dance, and visual art inspiration. The project embodies this year's Dance Is The Answer Art That Moves theme of which Dance/Metro DC Director Peter DiMuro emphasizes, "Art galleries will come alive with movement.”

In Double Take, “our project is really about the space itself,” explains Franklin. Prior to this evening's performance, the company spent time becoming intimately familiar with the Torpedo Factory space, twisting along a staircase, seeping into the floor, and weaving through arms and legs while balanced on chairs. Tonight, this exploratory "pre-performance" will be video-projected into the space while the audience simultaneously views a live performance of the same movement. Afterward, dancers will lead the audience to the original location of the video shoot where they can experience the movement again - as projected on screen and identically within the space itself. How will you identify with these visual experiences and spatial continuums?

    

Jane Franklin Dance performs Take a Deep Breath on Wednesday, April 27 at 7 pm at the Torpedo Factory located at 105 N. Union Street, Alexandria, VA 22314. Performance is free. 

Dance and Wisdom, Straight From The Horse’s Mouth

By Peter DiMuro and Cheryl Sidwell

Attempting to preserve the legacies of the NY dance world, Jamie Cunningham and Tina Croll, two stalwarts of that city’s dance scene, created the performance work FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH. The piece thrilled sold-out houses in subsequent versions worldwide while capturing a multiple decade’s eye-view of dance and dancers’ lives—on-stage, off-stage and behind-the-stage—in dynamic movement and stories. FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH now premieres in Washington, DC on May 1 & 3, 2009 at the Atlas Performing Arts Center located at 1333 H Street NE, including a mix of the wise and sage voices of our own region’s infamous pioneers in dance, alongside a vibrant group of young’uns who have squeezed a lot of living in their young bodies.

Brought to you through a collaboration of the Atlas and Dance/MetroDC’s Dance Is The Answer 2009, FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH is part improvisation and part story-telling, always moving (literally and otherwise). Yvonne Edwards, long the matriarch of Knock-On-Wood tap students and professionals, tells her story in words and rhythm, improvising with a new riff on the word riff. Marcia Freeman’s years of teaching dance at Gallaudet University—including communication in American Sign Language, another conceptual non-verbal language like dance—hits the stage with double dose of authenticity and simpatico. And renowned dance-critic George Jackson shares an his story with Sonia Henje’s ice-dancing troupe in Austria’s Vienna prior to the Nazi occupation where chances at stardom are left skating circles in the cross of time and world politics. The ever-evolving cast of approximately 30 DC area legends—and near legends—also includes Melvin Deal, Helen Hayes, Doug Yeuell, Gesel Mason, Sukanya Mukherji, Deborah Riley and the list goes on and on.

Friday, May 1st at 8:00 PM and Sunday, May 3rd at 2:00 PM
FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH
Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H Street NE, Washington, DC
Tickets are $25; DancePass discounts are available.
Tickets: www.atlasarts.org/tickets.php
DancePass: www.dancemetrodc.org
Dance Is The Answer 2009: www.danceistheanswer.org